If only. The two most despairing words in the English language.
She crossed the cluttered, heavily draped room that Evelyn had converted into an office. All of the rooms in the house were dark. Evelyn had never liked sunlight. She claimed it interfered with her work.
Gwen’s movement through the room stirred the still air. The crystal wind chimes suspended from the ceiling shivered, producing an eerie music that seemed to come from beyond the grave. The sound raised the hair on the back of Gwen’s neck.
In the doorway behind her, Max, Evelyn’s burly gray cat, meowed plaintively as if demanding that Gwen fix the situation. But there was no fixing death.
The body was crumpled on the floor beside the desk. Evelyn had been in her early seventies, a large, generously proportioned woman who had been caught in a fashion time warp like so many others who resided in the small town of Wilby, Oregon. With her long gray hair, voluminous tie-dyed skirts, and crystal jewelry, she had been a model of the proudly eccentric look that Gwen privately labeled Hippie Couture.
Evelyn’s blue eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. Her reading glasses lay on the floor. A photo had fallen beside one hand. The pinhole at the top of the picture indicated it had come from the corkboard over the desk. There was no blood or obvious bruising on the body.
“No sign of an injury, you’ll notice,” the mirror ghost said. “What does that tell us?”
“Always the instructor,” Gwen said. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”
“No point changing now, is there, dear? I repeat my question. What does the lack of an obvious injury indicate?”
“Could be natural causes. You were seventy-two years old, a type two diabetic who insisted on eating all the wrong foods, and you were absentminded when it came to taking your meds. You refused to lose weight, and the only exercise you got was an occasional stroll down by the river.”
“Ah, yes, the river,” the ghost said softly. “You won’t forget the river or the falls, will you, dear?”
“No,” Gwen said. “Never.”
She knew there was no hope, but she made herself check for a pulse. There was only the terrible chill and the utter stillness of death. She got slowly to her feet.
“This scene looks dreadfully familiar, doesn’t it?” the ghost said. “Brings to mind what happened two years ago.”
“Yes,” Gwen said. “It does.”
“Another person connected to the study is dead by what appears to be natural causes. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Gwen looked at the vision in the mirror. The ghosts were always wispy, smoky images—never sharp and clear like photographs. For the most part, the specters she encountered were strangers, but she had known a few of them all too well. Evelyn Ballinger had now joined that short list. Evelyn had been both mentor and friend.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen said to the ghost. “I didn’t see your e-mail until this morning. I called you right away. When you didn’t answer your phone, I knew something was wrong.”
“Of course you did, dear.” The ghost chuckled. “You’re psychic.”
“I got into the car and drove down here to see you. But it’s a four-hour trip from Seattle.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself, dear,” the ghost said. “There is nothing you could have done. It happened last night, as you can see. I was working here in my office. You remember that I was always a night owl.”
“Yes,” Gwen said. “I remember. Your e-mail to me came in around two o’clock this morning.”
“Ah, yes, of course. You would have been asleep.”
But she hadn’t been asleep, Gwen thought. She had been walking the floors of her small condo, trying to work off the disturbing images from the dream. It had been two years since Zander Taylor’s death, but each summer in late August the nightmares struck. Her talent for lucid dreaming allowed her to control the dreams to some extent, but she had not been able to dispel them. Each time she dreamed the terrifying scenes from that summer of death, she came awake with the same unnerving sense that it had not ended with Taylor going over the falls.
“I was up,” Gwen said. “But I wasn’t checking e-mail.”
She stepped back from the body and dug her phone out of her tote. Max meowed again and lashed his tail.
“I’m sorry, Max. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.”
Max did not look satisfied with that response. He watched her intently with his green-gold eyes.
She concentrated on punching in the emergency number and tried not to look at the mirror. Talking to ghosts was not a good thing. It made other people—potential lovers as well as friends—extremely nervous. After all, there were no ghosts. She was really talking to herself, trying to make sense of the messages that her odd form of intuition picked up at the scenes of violent death.
She usually went out of her way to avoid such conversations because she found them incredibly frustrating. There was, after all, very little she could do for the dead. That was the job of the police.
Years ago she had come to realize that if she was seeing ghosts in mirrors, windows, pools of water and other reflective surfaces, it meant that she had stumbled into one of the dark places in the world, a place tainted with the heavy energy that was laid down at the time of violent death. As the old saying went, murder left a stain. But she was not a cop or a trained investigator. She was just a psychic counselor who interpreted dreams for her clients and earned a little money on the side writing scripts for a low-budget cable television series. There was nothing she could do to find justice for the dead.
“When Wesley Lancaster finds out about my death, he’ll probably want you to turn it into a script for his show,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I can see it now. Was this reclusive paranormal investigator murdered by paranormal means? Is there a link to the mysterious deaths that occurred in this same small town two years ago?”
“You’re distracting me,” Gwen said. “I’m trying to call 911.”
“Why bother? We both know where this is going. The authorities will assume that I died of natural causes.”
“Which is entirely possible.”
“But your intuition is telling you that I was murdered like the others.”
“My intuition has sent me in the wrong direction before,” Gwen said.
“You’re thinking about what happened two years ago, aren’t you?”